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Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition

reuters.com

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Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition

#131

Post by posterboy »

ponderatul wrote: post #9

I always wanted to know how is the damage done determined ? "U.S. authorities say Dotcom and three co-accused Megaupload executives cost film studios and record companies more than $500 million and generated more than $175 million by encouraging paying users to store and share copyrighted material." Distributing copyrighted stuff is illegal, period. But the way those calculations are made worries me. Do they start fr…

The rather small claim of 500m probably accounts for that. I had a similar problem at a job: Eating the food that had to be thrown away was called stealing if not payed for. I argued I wouldn't pay that much under normal circumstances and just don't want to waste food, but the next day I found myself willing to pay in my shift for a snack at least while the food was still good, postponed it for a while because I didn't have the time and then even went the last stretch of the shift thinking the snack would be free if I just waited. It's the famous slippery slope.

On the other hand and more topical, after receiving a cease and desist letter and claims from a well known law firm I ignored them thinking I never directly payed for TV before and still indirectly do because advertisement is prised into the products I buy on the one hand, and because of bad availabilty I would have to pay a premium for DVDs which is not even in my budget nor my idea of my money's worth, but you might argue that I am just missing the incentive to work for it so there's indirect economic damage, as much as I hate to say that -- just playing devil's advocate. Ironically, if I had to work for it, I wouldn't have the time to binge watch as I did.

My biggest gripe is probably that media players are full of bugs, so it's unhygenic to load from unknown sources ...

Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition

#132

Post by franciscop »

fwgwgwgch wrote: post #63
franciscop wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the country! In Spain for instance it's totally legal as long as there is no commercial intention. Both "distributing" and "copyrighted" are terms that some times have not such clear boundaries. Is giving your sibling a used DVD illegal? Is selling it to a 2nd hand store illegal? A book is clearly legal to resell, right? Then why wouldn't some digital material be? There is a whole industry interested in…

Can we use this sub thread to post our knowledge of country laws about this? Don't worry USA you can continue on browsing ;)

Sure! I'm actually quite interested. Now that I live in Japan it's basically the opposite of Spain, here it is one of the most strict countries.

Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition

#133

Post by Dylan16807 »

slg wrote: post #111
balabaster wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um... Robin Hood was a fictional character. The schtick is what makes the legend. Without the schtick, he's just some schmuck that got busted for trafficking illegal copies of files. Don't confuse "being thoroughly amused by" with "falling for."

At the heart of the story Robin Hood is about a good person who was breaking unjust laws to fight for the little guy. Kim Dotcom wants you to think he is breaking unjust laws to fight for the little guy but he is actually doing it for his own personal enrichment either financially or egotistically. That it the distinction I want to make that I think was missing from your initial comment.

From this distance, I care about actions far more than motivation.

Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition

#135

Post by ElCapitanMarkla »

fareesh wrote: post #115

Kim claims that he gave Hollywood companies direct DB delete access for anything they didn't like, in addition to DMCA takedown request processing. There are arguments suggesting that he and his team knew that there was illegally copied content on his servers and they did nothing about it of their own volition. Is there a law that says that if you see something that was uploaded and you don't believe that it's licens…

I believe part of the case here was that they would hash uploaded content, only storing unique files once but would create a new link to the content each time someone uploaded it. And when they received the DMCA requests they only took down the reported link rather than all of the links to that file.

Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition

#136

Post by logfromblammo »

raattgift wrote: post #122
logfromblammo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just trying to imagine a situation where the damage claims would have to be evaluated even if the defendant won, or a settlement was reached, or the case got dropped. If the courts only ever examined the proven-liable claims for accuracy in the amount of liability, wouldn't that tend to introduce biases? Firstly, presupposing that the plaintiff's claims establish liability on the defendant, I think most people…

tl;dr: don't lie to a court; filing a claim is communicating to a court. I don't think things are as bad as you think, and certainly not as bad as insufficient access to decent professional advocacy in the first place (due to pitifully underfunded systems of legal aid, poor systems of costs control for pre-trial and even pre-claim phases of litigation, and "gang-up" attacks where a private party pursuing a civil clai…

> Finally, if you do not intend to go to trial you should not file a claim!

Should not? When only 1% of civil cases actually do go to trial, and the system is set up to encourage settlement, that sounds like an ethical argument.

There are plenty of lawyers out there that file their lawsuits primarily for the purposes of producing a settlement--patent trolls are an entire named subcategory of these.

There are plenty of litigants out there that never even intend to get to discovery, and you can just forget about the trial.

Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition

#137

Post by raattgift »

logfromblammo wrote: post #136
raattgift wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tl;dr: don't lie to a court; filing a claim is communicating to a court. I don't think things are as bad as you think, and certainly not as bad as insufficient access to decent professional advocacy in the first place (due to pitifully underfunded systems of legal aid, poor systems of costs control for pre-trial and even pre-claim phases of litigation, and "gang-up" attacks where a private party pursuing a civil clai…

> Finally, if you do not intend to go to trial you should not file a claim! Should not? When only 1% of civil cases actually do go to trial, and the system is set up to encourage settlement, that sounds like an ethical argument. There are plenty of lawyers out there that file their lawsuits primarily for the purposes of producing a settlement--patent trolls are an entire named subcategory of these. There are plenty o…

Yes, it's an ethical argument.

There are plenty of unethical litigating attorneys out there.

Some legal cultures are much better at weeding them out than others; some legal cultures even cultivate them as if they are valuable to the profession and the society it is embedded in. They aren't. They're caustic, and worse, they occasionally become elected politicians and elected or appointed judges.

Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition

#138

Post by jhayward »

jashmatthews wrote: post #108
jhayward wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many full tactical anti-terror assaults, including 9 operators deploying from helicopters in assault landings, has NZ done? Besides the raid on Dotcom, that is.

About 1000 per year, and on average they have to kill less than one person per year, despite 1 million guns for 4 million people. They make heavy use of helicopters as there’s only one squad covering the entire South Island, and only two covering the North Island.

Seriously? They're doing 3 anti-terror assaults every day of the year? Can you point me to some statistics? I had no idea NZ had such a terrorism problem.

Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition

#139

Post by jashmatthews »

jhayward wrote: post #138
jashmatthews wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 1000 per year, and on average they have to kill less than one person per year, despite 1 million guns for 4 million people. They make heavy use of helicopters as there’s only one squad covering the entire South Island, and only two covering the North Island.

Seriously? They're doing 3 anti-terror assaults every day of the year? Can you point me to some statistics? I had no idea NZ had such a terrorism problem.

More like SWAT than anti-terror, but yes, our police execute 3+ tactical responses per day.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...

Re: Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition

#140

Post by jhayward »

jashmatthews wrote: post #139
jhayward wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? They're doing 3 anti-terror assaults every day of the year? Can you point me to some statistics? I had no idea NZ had such a terrorism problem.

More like SWAT than anti-terror, but yes, our police execute 3+ tactical responses per day. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...

You are quoting stats on the Armed Offender squads, which are analogous to US SWAT teams.

Kim Dotcom was taken by the anti-terrorism Special Tactics Group, which is definitely not the Armed Offender Squad. They train with SAS, and are explicitly designed to take on high risk terrorist assaults. I'm asking how often they are deployed, and of course implicitly, whether serving warrants for copyright infringement is in their usual bailiwick.

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